Well, it was OK
The spinach was the best thing
Pay at the cashier
Yo! Noodles
City of Dreams, Macau
When you’re running a little late to a show, sometimes compromises have to be made. Like eating in a casino. It’s not the first time I’ve done it – though last time I was considerably less sober – and it probably won’t be the last. I mean after all, if gamblers feel like subsidising my food with their hard earned coin, who am I to refuse?
Yo! Noodles is nestled in the City of Dreams casino, somewhere between the Hard Rock Hotel, and the Grand Hyatt. Actually, to be honest, if you asked me to find it again, I would have great difficulty. That place is like a very spacious maze. Anyway, the main draw card (I think?) of Yo! Noodles is not, in fact, the exclamation point in its name which requires you to get excited when mentioning it, but rather the fact that everything on the menu is 28MOP (that’s Macanese Patacas, roughly equivalent to the HKD). That means all the dishes are around 4AUD. That’s not necessarily cheap by local standards, but it’s pretty cheap to me! However, all drinks are also 28MOP, which is a touch on the pricey side if you’re not drinking alcohol. Luckily, we were.
So I had the seafood vermicelli salad. I think it was supposed to be Thai style. Only there was neither enough lime nor fish sauce for it to be much more than bland. It was only redeemed by the use of those sneaky-type chillies which make their presence known only halfway through eating the dish.
Sam Tor Noodles
1/F, 30 Pottinger St, Central
Team Fatty (that is, @eatnik and I) are off and running. Merely hours after @eatnik’s 4:30am arrival – I had arrived the previous day – we headed off for our first stop in what is shaping up to be a food journey of epic proportions. Listed by CNNGo’s guide to Hong Kong as having the best chilli oil in Hong Kong, it was pretty obvious that this place was going to be high on our list of places to visit.
We arrived at around 9:30am, and the place was bustling, but not too busy for us to get a table right away. We shared a table with a middle-aged HK lady, who seemed bemused by how excited we were about the chilli oil, tasting it on its own before mixing it in with our noodles.
I ordered the beef brisket noodle. I like that (for me) it was the perfect breakfast size. Hearty, and satisfying, but not overly filling. And at $HK28 (around $4AUD) it’s an absolute steal. But that’s a trend you’ll be seeing a lot more of in these Hong Kong #fattyposts.
@eatnik had the wonton noodles (also $HK28), which came with four plump little babies sitting atop her bowl of noodles. On top of which, of course, she heaped a big spoonful of chilli oil.
Tia To
8 Whiteman St Crown Entertainment Complex, Southbank
Phone: 9292 6989
After a heady High Tea at the Langham, followed by an afternoon of grazing at the Good Food and Wine Festival, I had a couple of hours to kill before meeting a friend for a movie at Crown. I will admit to being somewhat… tipsy… after the GFWF (you can’t turn down a shed full of winery stands offering tastings now, can you?). So tipsy, in fact, I wandered into Rockpool, and asked for a seat at the bar, thinking “Hey! I’ll finally get to try that wagyu burger!” only to be politely told by the hostess that they’d be happy to fit me in – at 6, when they open. It was apparently only 5:15. Oops!
So I thought I’d have a look at one of the restaurants in the casino itself (I know! Why!?) seeing as I’d been there years ago as a student, taking advantage of the gambling-subsidised food on offer. I stopped at Tia To, curious to see what Crown’s version of pho would be like. I mean there’s a hefty amount of Vietnamese problem-gamblers, right? Surely their tastes must be catered for…
I was heartened by the impressive array of condiments on the table.
And by the noodle-slurping Chinese men who were also eating pho at the next table (even though they were Mandarin speakers, so not likely to be experts in pho authenticity?)
Unfortunately, at this point in time, my phone decided to die on me. Which was not only devastating in terms of my inability to document the noodles about to arrive at my table, but also it made things difficult in terms of meeting my friend to see the movie afterwards!
So you get no pictures of the actual pho – which in some way defeats the purpose of this post; I know, right? – but trust me when I say it was rather underwhelming. The amount of basil which came with the beanshoots and lemon was on the stingy side. The broth was one-dimensional in flavour – that dimension was MSG. The beef was similarly bland. It’s a bad sign when the best thing in a bowl of pho are the ‘beef balls’. Because they’re almost certainly from a packet that you can buy from any Asian grocer.
This place serves a soup noodle which is something of a travesty against pho. I was left wishing I had ordered the seafood platter special, and consoling myself in the fact I had a $4 bottle of Carlsberg. The only other upside I can think of about this experience was that the service was really quite good.
Tom Toon Thai Noodle Cafe
241 Victoria Parade, Abbotsford
Phone: 9417 7447
Opening up a Thai restaurant a couple of doors up from the institution that is Ying Thai is either a gutsy or a foolhardy move. A move, however, which seems to have paid off for the owners of Tom Toon Thai Noodle Cafe, and has also further cemented tiny stretch at the Hoddle street end of Victoria St as a little Thai enclave, next to its much more sprawling Vietnamese cousin.
Tom Toon does pretty authentic Thai food, but be warned: there are no curries at this Thai restaurant. Somewhat incongruous, but what they do, they do well.
Pumpkin Miso Noodles in Shiitake Dashi Broth
First of all I’d like to thank and congratulate Penny for coming up with such an innovative way for us to all share the joy of a noodle party, without having to eat them all ourselves, or leave out own homes, for that matter!
So for this party, I came up with this idea that I could infuse miso into udon noodles, and that I could teach myself to hand-pull sad udon noodles. Here is my FAILWHALE tale.
So it all started pretty well. I came across a hand-pulled noodle recipe, which wasn’t udon, but looked pretty good. The ingredients were pretty much:
- 500gm plain flour
- 300ml water
The dough came together looking like this:
Following the video, I rested it for 20 minutes, kneaded it until smooth, rested it for another five minutes and kneaded it again. Before the final kneading, I added about 2 tablespoons of white miso, and the same quantity of mashed pumpkin. In retrospect, the pumpkin was a big mistake. Far too watery, so I had to keep adding flour to compensate for the excess moisture. This was the beginning of the FAIL.
To cut a long, arduous, knead-y story short, the resulting dough was far too tight to be stretched, and I resorted to pulling out the pasta machine and super-laminating the dough with ever-increasing amounts of flour.
Not wanting to make ramen/spaghetti sized noodles, I continued on my lazy option, and went for fettucine-shaped noodles. If I had an obaasan (Japanese grandmother) she would have been rather upset. Although if I had an obaasan this travesty of noodle FAIL would never have happened! Seeing as I don’t, I persevered.
And boiled the noodles for about 3 minutes.
In the meantime, I had been simmering shiitake mushrooms and ginger for about two hours, to make a dashi broth.
It was lacking in flavour, so I added about 2 teaspoons of salt. Oh, by the way, that’s a quail egg I’m poaching in the soup ladle there.
My friend Mr R came around to help evaluate my Japanese experiment, which made me a little nervous because he is something of a Nihon-ophile, and had recently returned from Japan with tales of tonkotsu ramen and tonkatsu made from pork ribs, but I had caveated the exercise as experimentation, so he was quite gracious in his reception.
Time to plate up. Add noodles to broth (to keep them from sticking together as you assemble the other ingredients).
For my toppings, I included some silken tofu, shiitake mushrooms from the broth, grilled eggplant and snow peas. Mr R didn’t like quail’s eggs, so I had a poached one on mine, but omitted it from his.
Even though it was a strange fusion of fettucine and Japanese flavours, it all came together rather well.
Though next time, I’ll omit the pumpkin from the noodle, and add more miso. While the noodle had some flavour, it wasn’t nearly enough, considering I had left the broth quite simple (read bland) to compensate for flavoursome noodles.
I’m going to play around with putting other things in my noodles – the next candidate will be harissa!
You can find everyone links to everyone else’s noodles at Jeroxie.com!
Noodle Kingdom
175 Russell St, Melbourne CBD
Phone: 9654 2828
This was a meal I ate last year, but Gem and Tris’ recent tweets about Noodle Kingdom (albeit in Preston) over the weekend reminded me that I had it in my photo archives. So the news is not current, but I assume very little has changed in the last 6 months. Except I no longer work in the CBD, so it’s only now and then that I get to lunch in the city. Woe is me, for the noodle lunch options in Parkville are pretty poor. And noodle lunch, how much doth I love thee!?
One of the things that sets Noodle Kingdom apart from its competitors is that there’s a chef in the front window hand-making noodles. I scarcely think I need to recommend this place further. I’ll just see you there!
On this occasion, I had the hand-made soup noodles with beef brisket, and because that gargantuan bowl of goodness wasn’t enough – say what!? – I ordered the leek puffs, too. They were a little disappointing, really. A bit oily, and the filling wasn’t at all interesting. I took to dipping it in my brisket soup, which tuned out to be a good idea!
This isn’t a place where you go for the service, or really the ambience either. Neither is fantastic, but neither is bad. You go for the noodles, and you stay for the chance that the range of Shanghainese style cold dishes will be available. I’d say the odds on any given day are 60-40 in your favour.
